This print portrays a lively interior scene in the 17th century Dutch Republic. There are many figures around the large room, including men, women, and children. At the far right a man tries to embrace a resisting woman. Beside them, a man and a woman dance while a fiddler plays and others look on. On the left, a woman tends to a child as behind her a couple descend a wooden stairway from an upper floor. There are items such as cured meat, a lantern, a chair and laundry, hanging around this room.
Subject Matter
This print by Adriaen van Ostade, one of the most important and influential seventeenth-century Dutch artists, is thought to depict a May Day celebration or a wedding feast and is one of the artist’s most complex compositions. The open space with jumbled elements in the background—a hanging chair, disorderly laundry, and stored basins and baskets—as well as the overturned stool in the foreground animate the scene, reinforcing the bustling activity and various emotions of the figures. Ostade came from a family of artists and worked as both a painter and a print-maker, specializing in depictions of peasants and genre subjects of people dancing, fighting, and generally reveling. Indeed, the source for this work—seen reversed in the print—is a painting by Ostade in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art.
Label Copy
Gallery Rotation Spring/Summer 2011
Adriaen van Ostade
The Netherlands, 1610–1685
Villagers Merrymaking at an Inn (also known as The Dance in the Inn)
1652
Etching, engraving, and drypoint
Gift of Carl Fredric Clarke, 1949/1.115
This print by Adriaen van Ostade, one of the most important and influential seventeenth-century Dutch artists, is thought to depict a May Day celebration or a wedding feast and is one of the artist’s most complex compositions. The open space with jumbled elements in the background—a hanging chair, disorderly laundry, and stored basins and baskets—as well as the overturned stool in the foreground animate the scene, reinforcing the bustling activity and various emotions of the figures. A woman and child talking with a standing man at the left are balanced on the right side by the less decorous couple embracing before the fireplace.
Adriaen van Ostade came from a family of artists and worked as both a painter and a print-maker, specializing in depictions of peasants and genre subjects of people dancing, fighting, and generally reveling. Indeed, the source for this work—seen reversed in the print—is a painting by Ostade in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art. A work on a similar theme by one of Ostade’s students, Cornelis Dusart (1660–1704) may be seen nearby.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
This print portrays a lively interior scene in the 17th century Dutch Republic. There are many figures around the large room, including men, women, and children. At the far right a man tries to embrace a resisting woman. Beside them, a man and a woman dance while a fiddler plays and others look on. On the left, a woman tends to a child as behind her a couple descend a wooden stairway from an upper floor. There are items such as cured meat, a lantern, a chair and laundry, hanging around this room.
Subject Matter
This print by Adriaen van Ostade, one of the most important and influential seventeenth-century Dutch artists, is thought to depict a May Day celebration or a wedding feast and is one of the artist’s most complex compositions. The open space with jumbled elements in the background—a hanging chair, disorderly laundry, and stored basins and baskets—as well as the overturned stool in the foreground animate the scene, reinforcing the bustling activity and various emotions of the figures. Ostade came from a family of artists and worked as both a painter and a print-maker, specializing in depictions of peasants and genre subjects of people dancing, fighting, and generally reveling. Indeed, the source for this work—seen reversed in the print—is a painting by Ostade in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art.
Label Copy
Gallery Rotation Spring/Summer 2011
Adriaen van Ostade
The Netherlands, 1610–1685
Villagers Merrymaking at an Inn (also known as The Dance in the Inn)
1652
Etching, engraving, and drypoint
Gift of Carl Fredric Clarke, 1949/1.115
This print by Adriaen van Ostade, one of the most important and influential seventeenth-century Dutch artists, is thought to depict a May Day celebration or a wedding feast and is one of the artist’s most complex compositions. The open space with jumbled elements in the background—a hanging chair, disorderly laundry, and stored basins and baskets—as well as the overturned stool in the foreground animate the scene, reinforcing the bustling activity and various emotions of the figures. A woman and child talking with a standing man at the left are balanced on the right side by the less decorous couple embracing before the fireplace.
Adriaen van Ostade came from a family of artists and worked as both a painter and a print-maker, specializing in depictions of peasants and genre subjects of people dancing, fighting, and generally reveling. Indeed, the source for this work—seen reversed in the print—is a painting by Ostade in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art. A work on a similar theme by one of Ostade’s students, Cornelis Dusart (1660–1704) may be seen nearby.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
Born into a high-ranking samurai family, Eishi first studies painting under the then-head of the prestigious Kanô School, Kanô Eisen'in Sukenobu (official painter to the Tokugawa Shogunate). He was appointed to high court rank and given the name Eishi by none other than the tenth Tokugawa shôgun, Ieharu. In about 1786, he left Ieharu's service but was allowed to keep his name, even though he changed to the ukiyo e, a more popular style. In both prints and paintings, he specialized in pictures of beautiful women, done with elegance and refinement.
The painter and print designer Hosoda Eishi was best known for his images of the courtesans of Edo. As was common at the end of the eighteenth century, he often designed prints in large series as a subtle way to persuade the public to buy more of his work. For the series “Stylish Genji Disguises,” Eishi created fifty-four scenes, one for each chapter of the novel. Each triptych depicts a male dressed in ancient court robes (contemporary with the period when the novel was written), while the female characters are garbed in the most up-to-date urban fashions.
This particular image relates to a moment in the thirty-fourth chapter of The Tale of Genji when a young courtier playing kickball with his friends falls hopelessly in love with a princess, whom he has glimpsed through the blinds. Eishi expects his viewers to know the tale and understand his playful reversal of gender roles: instead of several men engaged in athletic activity, now there is only one, who stands forlornly with his ball in his hand; and instead of his stealing a glimpse of a shy, hidden maiden, he is surrounded by women, several of whom are eyeing him.
Maribeth Graybill, Senior Curator of Asian Art
Exhibited in "Stories from the Past: Narrative in Asian Art"
January 24–July 25, 2004
Inscription
Signed: Eishi ga; Publisher's Seal: Senichi han; "Kiwame" Seal (Perfect)
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
Born into a high-ranking samurai family, Eishi first studies painting under the then-head of the prestigious Kanô School, Kanô Eisen'in Sukenobu (official painter to the Tokugawa Shogunate). He was appointed to high court rank and given the name Eishi by none other than the tenth Tokugawa shôgun, Ieharu. In about 1786, he left Ieharu's service but was allowed to keep his name, even though he changed to the ukiyo e, a more popular style. In both prints and paintings, he specialized in pictures of beautiful women, done with elegance and refinement.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
Ostade was a Haarlem painter and etcher of peasant scenes. In this print a peasant is shown paying his bill to the innkeeper, so identified by the keys hanging from her belt. Other customers converse, drink, or smoke. Above the fireplace are a spinner's winder and a lantern.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
In ink over pencil on mount, l.r.: St. Pierre - Cath. April 1862. Bond notation, l.r. corner: B417.9 Photographer's blind stamp, on mount below print: PHOTOGRAPHIE / FRANCK / RUE ------- ? PARIS
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
George Bellows: Some Images Topical and Timeless: For George Bellows, arriving in New York City in 1904, constant upheaval was the order of the day. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Manhattan was transformed from a partially rural island to the epicenter of a metropolitan area. The constant evolution of the cityscape affected what Bellows drew and painted. But he drew inspiration, too, from his own changes and journeys and contradictions: Bellows was an Ohioan in New York, a formal master with a penchant for satire, a painter and maker of drawings who turned ferociously to lithographs in the last decades of his life. Bellows illustrated mass-circulation magazines and drew celebrity boxers, but always with an eye turned to the timeless.
Born in Columbus in 1882, Bellows spent his earliest years in New York taking art instruction which emphasized drawing. Indeed, through 1907 his most accomplished and technically proficient works of art were drawings. These finely rendered works on paper conveyed the artist’s observations of the world surrounding him, including not only views of tenement life and sporting events in New York, but also scenes inspired by trips back to Ohio.
In January of 1907 Bellows completed one of his most arresting images after a visit to an insane asylum managed by a family friend in Columbus. The drawing, entitled Dance in a Madhouse (now at the Art Institute of Chicago), portrays actual inmates in the Ohio State Mental Hospital during their weekly Thursday night dance, complete with an orchestra in the rear. Lunacy and joyful abandon dominate the mood on the dance floor, while despair reigns among those seated. Bellows was able to convey the feelings expressed in the drawing in a lithograph of the same title executed ten years later. While the world was changing on the outside, life at the madhouse could go on just the same.
Bellows did not complete his first lithographs until 1916, nearly a dozen years after his first impressions of New York City life. Over the next eight years he finished nearly two hundred different prints on the lithographic stone. He translated onto stone many of his favorite compositions, but probably, with the passage of time, he also looked for subjects that he felt were more than time-specific. Bellows completed four major oil paintings dealing with the 1907 excavation of the Pennsylvania Station, yet he never made any prints of this major architectural event. And his most famous lithograph, though it depicted a sport much changed even in the eight years since Bellows had first rendered the scene, seems as relevant today as it did the day it was made.
A Stag at Sharkey’s [], from the year 1917, is based upon a 1909 painting of the same title (now at the Cleveland Museum of Art). At first glance one might think that two boxing scenes executed in 1909 and 1917 would essentially be depicting the same subject. In reality, major changes in the structure of the sport were taking place, and Bellows was taking what had been a topical scene and suggesting that it contained something lasting. In 1909 public boxing was illegal. Therefore, in order for a match to take place in 1909, the event would have to be a private affair. "Sharkey’s Athletic Club" was actually a saloon owned by Tom Sharkey with a ring in the rear. Boxing was limited to "members" of the athletic club. This was a loosely organized group of local semi-professionals. Whenever an outsider was to compete at the club, he was given temporary membership and was known as a "stag."
In the painting and the print of A Stag at Sharkey’s, the individuality of the boxers is subordinated to their physical action. The onlookers in the foreground have much more of a human presence. Bellows realized that when he made the lithograph nothing should interrupt the viewer’s observation of the battle, so he removed the ring ropes in the foreground. The viewer suspends his disbelief at the stage-like setting much as one does at the theater.
Public boxing was legalized in 1910, leading to sustained popularity for both the sport and the best professionals. Bellows capitalized on this popularity, completing fifteen other boxing lithographs between 1916 and 1924. With the exception of the 1921 A Knock-Out, based on a pastel from 1907, all the prints dealt with known professional fighters. Today we see the prints as representing aspects of the ring, but in Bellows’ day they portrayed specific historical clashes that were part of that period’s consciousness. Many of the lithographs remain powerful images today, even though stripped of their recognized heroes.
By the beginning of 1921 Bellows established for himself a set working pattern in his well-lit studio, which was located on the top two floors of the townhouse that he owned at 146 East 19th Street, and embarked on a sustained surge of printmaking. The artist completed sixty lithographs between January and March of that year. Among the most notable of this group was his Self-Portrait (fig. 3). Bellows waited a full five years after beginning his printmaking career before executing this frank assessment of himself. He is portrayed before a mirror peering into his reflection with the balcony studio behind him. Bellows was left-handed, so naturally one would expect the reflection in the mirror to show him as right-handed with respect to the lithographic stone, as it does in the print. This mirror-like reflection, though, would have been reversed in the natural transfer of the image from the stone to the print. Consequently, he took into account the printmaking reversal so that the self-portrait as printed would indeed look like his mirror reflection.
During the winter of 1921 the artist continued to seek inspiration from his own past works. One particularly successful work was Evening Snow (fig. 4). The artist had first drawn the image in 1909, capturing the movement of the crowd in a snowstorm. The lithograph is a mirror image of the drawing. Therefore, Bellows must have redrawn the image on stone in the same orientation as the drawing. The work, though, shows in print form a greater resolution of detail. By 1921 the carriage on the right in the print would already be an anachronism, but the rest of the scene with the children at play in the snow would remain timeless.
While Bellows was inspired by previously conceived drawings and paintings, he also translated onto stone many commissioned illustrations. Bellows followed in the footsteps of other artists of his day who earned a good living supplying the illustrations for serialized fiction and, more significantly, for current news stories. In 1915 Bellows was commissioned by Metropolitan Magazine to accompany the writer John Reed during his coverage of the evangelist Billy Sunday during a revival meeting in Philadelphia. A drawing accompanying Reed’s article was issued as a print with little alteration eight years later (Fig. 5). Billy Sunday enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout this period, much like Billy Graham today, and lived until 1935. Choosing to publish the print, Bellows realized that the scene was not restricted to a given year or place.
Bellows died very young. He was only forty-two when he suffered a fatal infection of his abdomen following the rupturing of his appendix. Those were the days before antibiotics might have saved him. Still a young man, Bellows had a deep understanding of himself and his place within society and his family. Although today he is well remembered for his views of city life and sport, he garnered his highest prices as a painter during his lifetime for his portraits of family. It is significant that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which had its pick of many boxing scenes, chose to purchase in the year of his death the portrait of Bellows’ family entitled Emma and Her Children. Fully a quarter of Bellows’ lithographic production beginning in 1921 consisted of portraiture of his family. Often this group of prints is overlooked, but in cases such as Jean in a Black Hat (fig. 6), one is struck by how Bellows conveys his compassion for his child. He caught Jean in a moment balanced between seriousness and innocence, some fleeting hesitation in her eyes, dressed so adult-like in her Sunday finery at the age of eight. Forever, she will remain a spokeswoman for her father’s sensitivity and love. Glenn C. Peck, Director, Widing & Peck Fine Art, New York
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please fax a request to the attention of Orian Neumann, Assistant Registrar, at 734-474-7643. For other queries, email orian@umich.edu.edu.
